


In the Ashes

by hellkitty



Category: Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 12:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for tf rare pairing Senator/Orion 'aftermath' so, uh, spoilers for MTMTE 11</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Ashes

Cold cinders crunched under his feet, still-burnt air stinging Orion Pax’s olfactory sensors, as he picked his way through the ruins of what had once been the Academy of Advanced Technology. It was a cover-up, plain and simple.  A cover-up that once might have fooled him, but now served only to cast in higher, acrid contrast, the world, hard-edged, around him.

Orion wondered if anything in the world was pure, anymore.  Everything seemed tainted, gritty with corruption, smeared with ulterior motives.

He picked his way over the heat-warped wreckage of what had once been a doorframe, the door itself buckled and half-melted. It must have been as hot as a smelter in here, in parts. Parts that any incendiaries expert worth his spark plugs would know indicated localized accelerants. Faulty propex lines? Not even close.

Which meant the investigators were paid off. Everyone, it seemed, was stifled into silence, one way or another: money or fear or both. 

Maybe that’s what he saw in me, Orion thought. A mech who couldn’t be bought.

Broken glass cast splintered reflections from the searchlamps on his chassis, stretching him long and dark, silhouetted against the random flashes of sky.  It made the place seem even more broken, somehow, ugly and jagged and dark, while all around were the gleaming spires and platforms.

It was like walking through a ruined dream.

The mechs had scattered: Skids, Glitch, Windcharger. He hadn’t seen them since that night. He could only hope they’d be safe. Orion knew he was under investigation himself, constantly monitored. He’d only come here because he figured, in the end, it would look more strange if he didn’t.

He was glad they were safe, or at least had a chance.  Probably some protocol Shockwave had set up for them to keep them safe. He’d always been three steps ahead.

Except the one time it mattered.

Orion sighed, the vent of air gusting dust and ash and old cinders up from a heat-warped table.

“I don’t know why I came,” he said, frustrated and despairing. It seemed he only spoke so there could be some noise in this place, some sound in the destruction that seemed to swallow sound, the jagged, torn edges of the building’s remains baffling any noise of the city around. It wasn’t what he’d intended to say, what had brought him here.  But now, in the moment, it was truth.

Any clue, any evidence, had been either burned or picked over, and the place had the air of desolation that even the guttermechs avoided, that almost malign miasma, exhaling in the shadows that seemed to gather as the sun outside sloped downward.

“I think I came hoping to understand. Everything.”  Who Shockwave had been, what he was doing. He owed the Senator everything and the one time he’d been needed, he’d failed. It had hurt, worse than the hollow in his chassis after his conversion to carry the Matrix.

He turned, perching gingerly on the table, finding a plastic ident badge, with the too familiar face, the coloring green and gold. He’d recognize the face, anywhere, though. Even in the flashsnap he managed to radiate that sort of serenity, that friendliness that had put Orion at ease even in the worst of circumstances. Orion held it, the plastic blackened and rippled along the upper edge, but even that couldn’t dim the brightness of memory, of who Shockwave had been.

“I saw you, on the holovids,” he said. It was harder to say than he’d imagined mere words to a plastic image. “You, as you are now. There are rumors….” He couldn’t finish—Whirl had told him when he went to visit his former officer—of shadowplay: that the Institute had done their best to ruin everything about the Senator, violation of mind as well as body.  Whirl had said, with that sly glee of his, that it would be the best if Shockwave could still feel, under all that.

‘What,’ the copter had said, as though this were the key to himself, ‘is the use of humiliation if you aren’t there to be shamed?’ And then he’d subsided on the berth, the clumsy claws folded on his lap, with that air of a mech who’d said all he’d intended to say.

It was a horrible thought that in there Shockwave, as Orion knew him, persisted, seeing and feeling everything, aware of the way they’d mutilated his hands, his face, even his voice. It was exactly the kind of thought Whirl would have, and exactly the kind of thing, Orion thought, that if the Institute were able, would surely have tried.  

The rumors were bad enough, without making them real through sound.

“All I could think,” he said, running a thumb over the soot-darkened image of the cheek, “was that we’d failed.  You showed me so much. Not just the corruption, but…hope. A solution, a way out. And now.”  The image in the ident badge seemed to wink at him.  Shockwave’s face had always been so expressive, mercurial, and his expressions flowed over his facial plates like quicksilver.

Orion swept a hand over his chassis, over the hollow for the Matrix. It felt heavy now, even empty, heavier even than when he’d held the bomb. It was the weight of lost hope. 

“Now…I don’t know. I was hoping to find a clue. Something that would show me what to do, where to go. But…,” he shrugged, lifting his optics, to scan the rubble and slag. There was nothing salvageable here. 

He shook his head. What was he even doing here? Completing a circle, maybe. Honoring the dead.  Mourning some loss in himself. Maybe he’d know what it meant in the future.  Maybe it would all fall into place, like a mosaic. Maybe this, he thought, this ruin, this faded badge, maybe they were tesserae of that mosaic, important pictures, important pieces.

One thing was certain: there was nothing else here. Not even vermin. It was as if life would never return here, as if the entire building had been blasted out of life entirely, like the land of the dead.

And he was living, and needed to return to the land of the living.

A ping on his comm: Roller, waiting around the corner, restless.  He’d tried to warn Orion, but of all the wrong things. This was perhaps Roller’s tribute, his own mourning, that whatever Orion had schemed, Shockwave had paid the price. And in paying had possibly saved them all.

Orion moved to the threshold, cinders and splintered metal gritting underfoot. As he ducked under the last ceiling beam, to the street outside, a streetlamp caught the plastic of the ident badge he still held, loosely, in his hand.  A piece of the puzzle. A splinter of the past.

‘Remember me as I was,’ he’d said, just the barest quiver of tension under his usual serenity: a mech knowing his future and moving toward it, though afraid.  Courage, greater than any Orion figured he could muster.

Perhaps that was the key: memory, held in the brain, not the hand. Perhaps he was making too much of it, sitting and thinking, when he’d always been a mech to act.

Roller was waiting:  he moved down the cracked steps, like a line of broken teeth, the badge falling from his fingers to land smiling up, blank and serene, at the line between ruin and peace.


End file.
